UO Today

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. Molina is the author of three monographs: Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1940 (2006), How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the...

Poet Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor emerit of English and former director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Daniels is the author of six collections of poetry, The White Wave (1984) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; The Niobe Poems (1988) received honorable mention for the Paterson Poetry Prize; Four Testimonies (1998) and A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (2010) were sele...

Britt Wray’s hopeful talk demonstrates the emotional and existential effects of living in a warming world—and how we can get through them together. Although anxieties surrounding the climate crisis can cause us to burn out, give up, and question deeply personal decisions like whether to have children, working through these anxieties can unlock a deep capacity to care for and act on climate issues....

Priscilla Yamin, Political Science and 2022–23 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. “In this talk, I focus on “social egg freezing,” (defined as freezing eggs outside of medical necessity, infertility or in cases of same-sex families) and ask, not how has it changed women’s lives, but why it hasn’t. Rather than examining individual women, I focus on the laws, institutions, discourse, and economic imperati...

My guest today is Samoan writer and art critic Lana Lopesi, an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She joined the faculty in fall 2022. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she is the author of two books: False Divides: How Do We Get to Know Each Other Again? (2018) and Bloody Woman: Essays (2021). Her edited volume P...

Britt Wray is a Human and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. She is the author of the book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022). Her research focuses on the mental hea...

"Memories of Betrayal and Betrayal of Memory: Narratives of Defeat in Chile and Argentina" Yosa Vidal Collados, PhD candidate, Romance Languages, and 2022–23 OHC Dissertation Fellow "My dissertation questions the current cultural boom of fictional and non-fictional works on the politics of memory, characterized by a Manichaean rhetoric of heroes versus enemies, heroes versus traitors. Analyzing a...

Writer Putsata Reang is a veteran journalist whose writings have appeared in national and international publications, including the New York Times, Politico, the Guardian, Ms, The Seattle Times, and the San Jose Mercury News. Putsata was born in Cambodia and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the University of Oregon. Her memoir Ma and Me was published in...

Knight takes a deep dive on twenty artists who inspired him to use his art to address social issues—artists like Ollie Harrington, Langston Hughes, Octavia Butler, Oscar Michaux, James Baldwin, alongside current artists like Dread Scott, Public Enemy, and Fly.

Writer Thomas Beller is Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of 5 books including Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, published in 2022. Beller reads from a work in progress and talks about his book about basketball. He also shares a story about his visit with Barry Lopez in 2020. On February 22, 2023, Beller will give a read...

Danielle Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. Dean Conway gave a talk titled “Practicing Antiracism Unapologetically: Using Professor Derrick Bell’s thesis of the permanence of racism as inspiration for 'Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession’” on February 1st, 2023, as this year’s Derrick Bell Lecturer. The annual De...

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Comics and Cartoon Studies, University of Oregon In How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, a...

Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor of Digital Platforms and Ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Phillips studies the connections between political communication, interpersonal communication, and information dysfunction. Her monograph This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture w...

Cartoonist Keith Knight is the creator of the comic strips The K Chronicles and The Knight Life, and the socio-political single panel called (t)hink. Knight was a co-creator, co-writer, and an executive producer on the Hulu streaming series Woke, which was inspired by his comix and life in San Francisco. On February 7, 2023 Knight will give a lecture titled “The Intersection of Art and Social Just...

Johanna Bard Richlin, Anthropology and 2020–21 Faculty Research Fellow. Why do migrants become more deeply evangelical in the United States and how does this religious identity alter their self-understanding? In the Hands of God examines this question through a unique lens, foregrounding the ways that churches transform what migrants feel. Drawing from her extensive fieldwork among Brazilian migra...

Poet Jayme Ringleb is an assistant professor of English at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ringleb’s debut collection So Tall It Ends in Heaven was published by Tin House in 2022. Ringleb’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewane...

Vidusha Devasthali is the Senior Director of Foundation Relations at the University of Oregon. She talks about the importance of research funding by private foundations.

Alex Segrè Cohen is an assistant professor of Science and Risk Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. She also serves as a research associate in the Center for Science Communication Research. She talks about how people make decisions about their behavior as it relates to risks such as COVID-19 and climate change.

Adriana Miramontes Olivas is the new curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Miramontes Olivas oversees the JSMA’s Latinx collection, which has been one of the fastest growing areas of art in the museum. She talks about some upcoming exhibits.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith is a Klamath Modoc visual artist, writer, and activist. Utilizing painting and traditional Indigenous art practices, her work explores space in between the Indigenous and western paradigms. Her painting Enrollment is featured in the exhibition Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art through December 18, 2022.

Writer Betsy Bonner is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake (2016) and the memoir The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing, an NPR Best Book of 2020. She reads from Round Lake and discusses her writing.

Juliet Schor is an Economist and a professor of Sociology at Boston College. She discusses her research on consumer society and consumer culture, working hours and lifestyles, environmental degradation, the sharing economy. Schor is the 2022 Wayne Morse Chair in Law and Politics. She gave a talk "Gig Economy: Predatory Platforms, Precarious Work" as part of the Morse Center’s two-year focus on Mak...

Sarah Wald, Environmental Studies and English, and 2022–23 Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Oregon. This project examines the movement to diversify public lands access, outdoor recreation, and employment in the US. It focuses on organizations, social media accounts, and cultural productions (films, graphic novels, creative non-fiction) that counter the whitenes...

Sister Helen Prejean is the founder of the Ministry Against the Death Penalty and the author of "Deadman Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate." She discusses her work with death row inmates and talks about why the death penalty should be abolished. Sister Helen will speak at the UO on October 27, 2022 as a guest of the UO's Prison Education Program.

Damian Radcliffe, is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon. He discusses how the media and the practice of journalism have evolved in recent decades. He also talks about the decline of the publics' trust in journalism, the effect of social media, and the importance of local media.